First it has been a historic error to care what a few dudes on this mag board decide who is top person of the year.Why do they know better then anyone, or anyone ever, WHY???Its silly! Complaining is confirming they are a authority better then others!

anyways its nice to see a Christian personage.They are left wing and might think this Pope is more liberal. I understood he was more pro evolution and noted so.There is a lot of attach against the catholic church these days and many see it as harmful to liberal and democratic support by the old coalition of ethnic Catholics in the States. The left wing is stirring up the natives too much perhaps.Other secret motivations are probably going on. Years ago I concluded tIME was a fraud in motives about who they selected. All politics by journalists who think they rule right and wrong.is it possible its a innocent thing. NAW.

Some of the progressive politics blogs I follow are all excited by this because apparently Francis made a speech condemning capitalism and seriously think he is going to make the church a progressive force for ending poverty. I have a hard time taking seriously anything a guy who surrounds himself with jewels and priceless art has to say about poverty.

Yeah, it reminds of when a certain president got the Nobel peace prize because intellectuals were so impressed with his anti-war rhetoric during the campaign. Once elected, this guy did not depart in the least from his predecessors' reliance on the rule of force in foreign policy.

The Nobel committee was clearly overwhelmed by the idea of the first black president and the expected relief from a long season of neo-conservative war mongering. I expect any Democrat in the running would provide an improvement in the second category over your average deranged and borderline mentally ill U.S. conservative. But let us hope that the committee has firmly returned to their best practise of recognizing accomplishments that have been legitimized by the test of time.

I forgot that one. Didn't pope JPII get one too? And yet, Catholic Church and most religions in Rwanda are responsible for encouraging hatred toward others purely based on religious differences. An agnostic like me, and a ex-member of Catholic Church, I'm appalled that the head of a religion that promotes hate, among others toward, Jews like me, got a Peace Nobel Prize. If there is hope for religion, it is among the pacifistic ones, which are few. If there was a religion that didn't have anything to do with bloodshed in Rwanda, I want to know about it. Same applies to Nazi Germany. Jews were the only ones that opposed the regime. No one else except some fractions of Christianity-pacifists

They are liberal surely and anyways of the "progressive' type. I don't read liberal stuff because all the media is liberal and off the same rack.Anyways i've heard the new pOpe is liked because they think he's more accepting of homosexuality and abortion and socialism etc.so I , suggest, TIME wants to promote him as opposed to some future conservative one. Politics by big media is a old game.They are trying to influence the Catholic church and her people to certain conclusions desperately passionately held by the press. Lame motivation from lame left wingers in lame rags.It should of been a best selling book ID creationist.Now that would be interesting in the cafe's of the land.

Since the Nobel Peace Price is mentioned, as a Norwegian I only want to say that I am not alone in being disappointed by the election of Obama as a recipient. I only want to point out that the Peace Price Committee is independent of the goverment and is not accountable to any institutution or organ inside our outside of government.

But, because the policy is to elect retired or former politicians to the committee's governing body it is quite understandable that foreign governments like the Chinese find it hard to understand that they do not represent the state of Norway.

We are suffering an ice front from the Chinese lasting three years now because of that, and I find it quite possible that a committe with less political ties and governmental background might sometimes have opted for other candidates well within the will and legacy of Alfred Nobel.

With a career and background in politics they are conditioned and can't stop thinking like politicians.

But there is criticism and I belive the Swedes are not too happy with all decisions by our committe. Let us hope some changes will be made before the credibilty of the price is irreparably compromized. I don't see any risk of not finding less controversial and yet well deserving candidates.

That Francis is utterly irrelevant to your life, or the life of your friends, (as well as to my life) may be a good reason to feel disappointed in the selection, but is hardly a reason to claim that the choice is mistaken.

Fully 1/6 of the people on the planet look to this man for spiritual leadership, and he has used that position to significantly alter the rhetoric and the intellectual focus of the church. He has had a very big impact, even if not for any of us.

The position of the catholic church has not changed one iota on any position. It is exactly the same paedophilic, homophobic and misogynistic organization that is was before frankenburger was airliifted out of his role of aiding and abetting central and south american fascist dictatorships to his new role of listening to voices in his head and pulling moral pronouncements out his his backside that have a direct and often times murderous effect on millions of people.

That 1/6th of the people in this planet look to this criminal for "spiritual" (whatever the fuck that means) leadership is first of all probably not true, I suspect that a large proportion of those who self identify as catholic do it solely out of inertia, peer and social pressures (I know that I did), and those who actually do provide moral and financial support to that international criminal, kiddy fucking cartel are as complicit in the crimes committed against humanity as the feral predators who inhabit the hierarchy of the catholic church.

The catholic church does not have an intellectual focus to change, what it has is a raw and naked lust for power.

But you are correct in saying that he does have a very impact on the happiness and well being of the sentient beings that inhabit this planet and it is a uniformly negative one.

That seems more like throwing up than engaging in rational discourse Steve. The tone reminds me of what I see in the comment sections of rightwing blogs - the content coming from a different direction of course...Why emulate that?

Laurence A. Moran

Larry Moran is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Toronto. You can contact him by looking up his email address on the University of Toronto website.

Sandwalk

The Sandwalk is the path behind the home of Charles Darwin where he used to walk every day, thinking about science. You can see the path in the woods in the upper left-hand corner of this image.

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Some readers of this blog may be under the impression that my personal opinions represent the official position of Canada, the Province of Ontario, the City of Toronto, the University of Toronto, the Faculty of Medicine, or the Department of Biochemistry. All of these institutions, plus every single one of my colleagues, students, friends, and relatives, want you to know that I do not speak for them. You should also know that they don't speak for me.

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Quotations

The old argument of design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me to be so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows.Charles Darwin (c1880)Although I am fully convinced of the truth of the views given in this volume, I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists whose minds are stocked with a multitude of facts all viewed, during a long course of years, from a point of view directly opposite to mine. It is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions as "plan of creation," "unity of design," etc., and to think that we give an explanation when we only restate a fact. Any one whose disposition leads him to attach more weight to unexplained difficulties than to the explanation of a certain number of facts will certainly reject the theory.

Charles Darwin (1859)Science reveals where religion conceals. Where religion purports to explain, it actually resorts to tautology. To assert that "God did it" is no more than an admission of ignorance dressed deceitfully as an explanation...

Quotations

The world is not inhabited exclusively by fools, and when a subject arouses intense interest, as this one has, something other than semantics is usually at stake.
Stephen Jay Gould (1982)
I have championed contingency, and will continue to do so, because its large realm and legitimate claims have been so poorly attended by evolutionary scientists who cannot discern the beat of this different drummer while their brains and ears remain tuned to only the sounds of general theory.
Stephen Jay Gould (2002) p.1339
The essence of Darwinism lies in its claim that natural selection creates the fit. Variation is ubiquitous and random in direction. It supplies raw material only. Natural selection directs the course of evolutionary change.
Stephen Jay Gould (1977)
Rudyard Kipling asked how the leopard got its spots, the rhino its wrinkled skin. He called his answers "just-so stories." When evolutionists try to explain form and behavior, they also tell just-so stories—and the agent is natural selection. Virtuosity in invention replaces testability as the criterion for acceptance.
Stephen Jay Gould (1980)
Since 'change of gene frequencies in populations' is the 'official' definition of evolution, randomness has transgressed Darwin's border and asserted itself as an agent of evolutionary change.
Stephen Jay Gould (1983) p.335
The first commandment for all versions of NOMA might be summarized by stating: "Thou shalt not mix the magisteria by claiming that God directly ordains important events in the history of nature by special interference knowable only through revelation and not accessible to science." In common parlance, we refer to such special interference as "miracle"—operationally defined as a unique and temporary suspension of natural law to reorder the facts of nature by divine fiat.
Stephen Jay Gould (1999) p.84

Quotations

My own view is that conclusions about the evolution of human behavior should be based on research at least as rigorous as that used in studying nonhuman animals. And if you read the animal behavior journals, you'll see that this requirement sets the bar pretty high, so that many assertions about evolutionary psychology sink without a trace.

Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution Is TrueI once made the remark that two things disappeared in 1990: one was communism, the other was biochemistry and that only one of them should be allowed to come back.

Sydney Brenner
TIBS Dec. 2000
It is naïve to think that if a species' environment changes the species must adapt or else become extinct.... Just as a changed environment need not set in motion selection for new adaptations, new adaptations may evolve in an unchanging environment if new mutations arise that are superior to any pre-existing variations

Douglas Futuyma
One of the most frightening things in the Western world, and in this country in particular, is the number of people who believe in things that are scientifically false. If someone tells me that the earth is less than 10,000 years old, in my opinion he should see a psychiatrist.

Francis Crick
There will be no difficulty in computers being adapted to biology. There will be luddites. But they will be buried.

Sydney Brenner
An atheist before Darwin could have said, following Hume: 'I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one.' I can't help feeling that such a position, though logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty unsatisfied, and that although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist

Richard Dawkins
Another curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understand it. I mean philosophers, social scientists, and so on. While in fact very few people understand it, actually as it stands, even as it stood when Darwin expressed it, and even less as we now may be able to understand it in biology.

Jacques Monod
The false view of evolution as a process of global optimizing has been applied literally by engineers who, taken in by a mistaken metaphor, have attempted to find globally optimal solutions to design problems by writing programs that model evolution by natural selection.